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Sunday, January 12, 2014

Emotions are instincts, instincts are quite literally, connections between neurons that were either fabricated in the womb, during infancy, or would develop during childhood, not based off environment, but instead, genetics.

Contrary to popular thought, emotions, or rather, instincts, are not "human".

The other organisms of this world that we call "animal" do in fact have emotions.

Hence the bunny feels fear when the fox chases it.

Another thing, emotions are irrational, for instance, when you feel fear. Adrenaline is released, your heart rate increases, and you are more prone to making less thought out decisions. At no point during that process, did you have any control.

You did not tell your body, "hey! Release X amount of adrenaline right now!".

Now, irrationality does not = bad. If you really want to get philosophical, there is no such thing as good, or bad.

For instance, the bunny when in the presence of a hungry fox. does not have the mental capacity, nor the time. To think out what a fox is? why is it chasing it? Or even attempt to comprehend the concept of hunger.

In this situation, irrationality, is quite useful, evolution does all the work, and fabricates the needed neural networks for you, and also sets the stimuli that will activate these instincts.

The problem is, instincts were made to deal with, for the most part, static environments, environments that would not change for hundreds of thousands of years.

Humans on the other hand, change the environment constantly, from an evolutionary perspective, very rapidly. Far faster than any species can genetically evolve to keep up with. Hence the reason why most are going extinct when in the presence of humans.

From this perspective, we can start to see how our irrational emotions, would not work well in our human made environments.

Especially seeing how we have no natural predators, and that how most problems we come across, require intense thought/mental processing. You can start to see how our once vital irrational instincts, have now become detrimental. Which means the rational thing to do, would be to get rid of our emotions, or at least replace them with new ones, that would work better with our environment.

Emotions such as fear, jealousy, and anger, are no longer needed, and are some of the emotions we would benefit from the most when removed.

Though some would argue, that emotions make us "human", we'll as I stated before, we are not the only species with emotions.

Also, if there was anything that would be an indicator of us being "human". It would be our rationality, it would be the fact that unlike any other species on this planet. Humans are the only ones that make cities, technological advancements, and wonder about our existence/place in the universe.